With the employer mandate delays being the latest setback to U.S. president Obama's push for national healthcare, it's worth looking at how other countries are successfully tackling the same problem. The United Kingdom has had nationalized healthcare for years, and one of the things that makes this effort so successful is its approach to data collaboration — something Forrester calls Adaptive Intelligence.

While the UK hasn't successfully moved into fully electronic health records, it has in place today a health records sharing system that lets its over 27,000 member organizations string together patient care information across providers, hospitals, and ministries, creating a more full and accurate picture of each patient, which results in better care. At the heart of this exchange is a central data sharing system called Spine. It's through Spine that all the National Health Service (NHS) member organizations connect their data sets for integration and analysis. The data-sharing model Spine creates has been integral in the creation of summary care records across providers, an electronic prescription service, and highly detailed patient care quality analysis. As we discussed in the Forrester report "Introducing Adaptive Intelligence," no one company can alone create an accurate picture of its customers or its business without collaborating on the data and analysis with other organizations who have complementary views that flesh out the picture.